POVERTY: India: Playing with Poverty Statistics

May 17 2011
 Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and a business/academic editor. Her articles have been published in various international newspapers and magazines.


The poverty line for a given individual can be defined as the money the individual needs to achieve the minimum level of ‘welfare’ to not be deemed ‘poor,’ given its circumstances.”
This is how Martin Ravallion, director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, defines the poverty line. In 2005, the World Bank revised the international poverty line up from $1 a day to $1.25 a day, but countries are allowed to set their own national poverty line. The Planning Commission has set India’s national line at 578 rupees a month, or the equivalent of 43 U.S. cents a day.
Even assuming only a charitable (to the government, that is) 30 days a month, that works out to less than 20 rupees a day. A half-litre packet of milk at Mother Dairy costs 10 rupees. One mango, those in season and heaped on carts by the side of the street, costs 10 rupees. And a cabbage …but no, your 20 rupees a day has already been spent. If you spend more than that, even on clothing or education or fuel, you cannot be termed as below the poverty line and therefore you are not eligible for BPL-related benefits and subsidies on food, shelter, and medical treatment. And note that the luxurious 20 rupees a day is for city dwellers; rural people have to spend less than 15 rupees a day in order to be below the poverty line.
The absurdity of such a low poverty line is astounding. Even the World Bank, which does not usually comment on national poverty lines, feels that India’s is too low and was hoping for a more realistic peg at $1.17 a day. Many concerned individuals have called India’s poverty line the “starvation line.” In fact, it is tending more toward the flat-line on a cardiac monitor.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (developed by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative) puts the number of poverty-stricken Indians at 645 million. A recent report by the Asian Development Bank says rising food prices will push a further 30 million Indians below the poverty line of $1.25 a day. According to the National Family Health Survey (2006) by the Government of India, the child malnutrition rate is 46%, which human rights lawyer Colin Gonzalves says translates into a horrific 2,500 child deaths every day.
Are the members of the Planning Commission living in India in 2011? Why this total disconnect with reality?
Now I know some will argue and say: “Hey, stop picking on the Government of India! Can’t you see they’re trying to do their best … for themselves, that is? So what if they spend money on seemingly unimportant things (like the Commonwealth Games, unnecessary signs, and personal security guards) and remain impassive while some of their colleagues are filling their Swiss bank accounts and lining their own pockets with our tax dollars? Besides, the state governments are at fault, too. And I earn way more than 578 rupees a month anyways – in fact, I spend almost that much on a cup of coffee whenever I stop in at 360 at the Oberoi. So what do I care about what or where the poverty line is or who’s under it? Let them eat cake.”

I think I’ve heard those famous last words somewhere else before.
But a second look at this whole issue got me doing a re-think: If we can have a floating exchange rate and a floating gold price, why not a floating national poverty line? It could actually be a big advantage in lowering our poverty rates.
While having the international poverty line at $1.25 a day may show India as having some 600 million people below it, simply moving the national poverty line to 43 cents a day reduces those below the poverty line to about 440 million. In fact, if the Planning Commission revises the poverty line to 20 cents a day, they can reduce poverty yet again. Of course, they could drop the national poverty line to 1 cent a day and thereby eradicate poverty in India altogether.
Learning from the wisdom of the government, I’ve decided to adopt similar measures for a more personal problem. I’ll be turning 50 next month … but that sounds rather old. So instead of accepting that reality and taking practical steps – like putting aside funds for later years or taking better care of my health – I’m going to pretend I’m living on Mars and then, using the Martian measurement of time to calculate my age, I can say I’m just a sprightly 26 years. Of course, I may die before I’m 40, but at least I can live and die under a happy illusion.
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/05/17/india-journal-playing-with-poverty-statistics/

Why 300 million more people are suddenly poor

By Jina Moore, November 17, 2010

Kigali, Rwanda

In November, 300 million more people around the world were suddenly poor – on paper, at least. The latest numbers on poverty from the United Nations, released Nov. 4, include a new measurement for poverty and reveal some surprises.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) raises the number of poor by 21 percent, to more than 1.7 billion. According to the MPI, sub-Saharan Africa is still home to the greatest proportion of the world's poor, but more than half of the total number of poor lives in South Asia.
These numbers, and the new index that produced them, are part of the UN's annual Human Development Index (HDI), a statistical touchstone. It covers everything from the number of women who die in childbirth to how many people have Internet access and can sway decisions on US policy, influence where nonprofits spend money, and help determine where donors give.
For years, the HDI has set the standard for just how little a person has to live on to be considered poor. The answer? $1.25. But some researchers have long said income alone doesn't define poverty.
"There are some things money can't buy," says Sabina Alkire, cocreator of the index and director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, which launched the index in collaboration with the UN. "It might not buy electricity; it might not buy a public health system, or an education system."
Ms. Alkire's index looks at poverty more experientially. It uses existing survey data and categorizes households as poor if they lack three or more of the 10 poverty indicators, which are spread across health, education, and basic standards of living. "For the first time ever, it measures poverty by looking at the disadvantages poor people experience at the same time," she says.
Examining more than income changes the equation. It doubles the poor in Ethiopia, where 39 percent of people live on less than $1.25 a day. But 90 percent are "multidimensionally poor," or lacking at least three of the 10 indicators.
"The point is you can have rapid progress on the income poverty side without commensurate progress on other side," says Jeni Klugman, director and lead author of the Human Development Report, where the index debuted.
That's true even in the developed world. Hungary is categorized as a "high human development" country, and fewer than 2 percent of its people live on less than $1.25 a day. But under the MPI, that number triples.
Some specialists have raised objections to the new index, including the director of research at the World Bank, which publishes its own income measure for poverty. Among the criticisms is that the measure is still a single standard, even if it looks at many factors.
"If my bosses were to ask for my recommendation on using the MPI as a factor in allocating USAID resources among countries or programs, I would recommend against doing so," says Don Stillers, an economist for the US Agency for International Development, in an e-mail message. "Rather, I would emphasize the ongoing need to pay attention to evidence on each major dimension of poverty in each country we work in."
Duncan Green, head of research at Ox­fam International and author of "From Poverty to Power," says the measurements are a mixed bag. "There's a wealth of single indices … that cram too much into one pot, but governments notice them, and they notice if they're doing better than their neighbors."
Aid workers say the MPI can help them spend their program money more efficiently – and argue to donors to give those dollars more persuasively.
In the aid world, "[W]e've known for a long time that while a country might look like it's doing fine on a national level, there are great disparities when you look below the surface," says Carlisle Levine, a senior technical adviser for CARE. "For us, it's added information that helps us back up our arguments for making the sort of investments we make."
But Mr. Green says the new measure doesn't go far enough. "The good thing is there's a better picture of what poverty is really about," he says. "But it's a crude measure in terms of how poor people talk about their lives."
Indeed, Alkire of HDI admits her index isn't perfect. She acknowledges that good data are hard to come by, and not all types of data that researchers want even exist. "These are messy numbers, and comparisons are fraught with danger," she says. But she also thinks her approach gives existing information more context and helps correct misperceptions.
"India alone has more people than the 37 sub-Saharan African countries," she says. Comparing countries with big-picture data treats each country equally, but that can literally change how each person inside the country is valued.
"I wanted to look at poor people with an equal weight wherever they lived," she says, "instead of letting the size of their country dictate how much we care about them." 
 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-Issues/2010/1117/Why-300-million-more-people-are-suddenly-poor

POVERTY: Half of India’s population lives below the poverty line

August 5th, 2010
According to a new Oxford University study, 55 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, or 645 million people, are living in poverty. Using a newly-developed index, the study found that about one-third of the world’s poor live in India.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has been developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as a more precise and comprehensive means of estimating poverty levels. It will replace the Human Poverty Index that has been used in the UNDP’s annual Human Development Report since 1997.
The MPI assesses a range of factors or “deprivations” at the household level as well as income and assets. These include: child mortality, nutrition, access to clean drinking water, sanitation, cooking fuel, electricity, and years of schooling and child enrolment. “A person is considered poor if they are deprived in at least 30 percent of the weighted indicators,” the study states.
As measured by the new index, half of the world’s poor are in South Asia (51 percent or 844 million people) and one quarter in Africa (28 per cent or 458 million). While poverty in Africa is often highlighted, the Oxford research found that there was more acute poverty in India than many African countries combined. Poverty in eight Indian states—Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal—exceeded that of the 26 poorest African countries.
The study examined poverty across 28 Indian states, concluding that “81 percent of people are multidimensionally poor in Bihar—more than any other state. Also, poverty in Bihar and Jharkand is most intense—poor people are deprived in 60 percent of the MPI’s weighted indicators. Uttar Pradesh is the home of largest number of poor people—21 percent of India’s poor people live there. West Bengal is home to the third largest number of poor people.”
The last figure is particularly significant as West Bengal has been ruled since 1977 by a Left Front coalition government led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM). Far from being “socialist” or “Marxist”, the Stalinist CPM has been responsible for implementing the pro-market agenda of economic restructuring carried out in other states and nationally by openly bourgeois parties. The result has been a decline in living standards for the majority and a deepening divide between rich and poor.
The Oxford University research also exposed high levels of poverty among India’s oppressed castes and tribal peoples. The poverty level among India’s so-called Scheduled Tribes is 81.4 percent. “The intensity of poverty is also very high among Scheduled Tribes, who are deprived in 59.2 percent of weighted indicators on average,” the study stated. The MPI for Scheduled Castes was 65.8 percent and for Other Backward Castes (OBC) was 58.3 percent.
The figures expose the Congress-led government’s claim that India’s economic growth has been “inclusive”. In fact, successive Indian governments led by Congress and the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) are responsible for economic policies that have boosted the profits of big business and the wealth of a tiny layer at the expense of the working class and rural poor.
By focussing on a broader range of factors, the Oxford University study has highlighted the continuing lack of basic facilities for the majority of the Indian population. Governments at the national and state levels have failed to provide even the most rudimentary assistance for hundreds of millions of people. Moreover, existing public services have been further undermined by the policies of privatisation and restructuring.
Only 31 percent of India’s population had access to improved sanitation in 2008. As a result of the lack of health care and food, 61 million children in India are stunted, the largest figure for any country, according to a UNICEF report. It also stated that the health of children suffers not just due to poor hygienic conditions and lack of nutritional food but also because mothers often suffer from anaemia and malnutrition during pregnancy.
Sharply rising food prices, including an average 83 percent increase since 2008, have been devastating for the country’s poor. Their situation has been further aggravated by recent fuel price hikes announced by the Indian government. The United Nations World Food Program (UNWFP) recently painted an alarming picture, reporting that nearly 350 million people—roughly 35 percent of India’s population —was food insecure and consumed less than 80 percent of their total energy requirements.
More than 1.5 million children in India are estimated to suffer from malnourishment and 43 percent of children under five years of age are underweight, according to the latest UNWFP report. The proportion of anaemic children has increased by six percent in the last six years, with 11 states reporting 80 percent child anaemia rates.
Another study that used a household income of $US2 a day as the poverty benchmark found that India not only has more poor people than sub-Saharan Africa, but also has a higher level of poverty. In India, 75.6 percent of the population, or 828 million people, live below the poverty line as compared to 72.2 percent, or 551 million people in sub-Saharan Africa.
On the other end of the scale, the wealthy few in India have amassed great riches. While impacted by the global financial crisis, the number of US dollar billionaires in India on the Forbes list rebounded to 49 in 2010, after falling to 24 last year. The figure falls just short of the record high of 53 in 2008.
The Financial Express commented that year: “The wealth amassed by Indian billionaires—estimated at 340.9 billion dollars by the US business magazine Forbes—is nearly 31 percent of the country’s total GDP. This gives them nearly three times more weight in the economy than their American counterparts and over ten times of those in China. The GDP share of Indian billionaires’ wealth is more than four times of the global average.”
The situation is similar this year. While 49 individuals preside over what for most Indians is unimaginable wealth, the majority of people are struggling to survive from day to day. In India’s financial capital of Mumbai, more than six million desperately poor people, half of the city’s population, eke out an existence in the slums. Mumbai’s gleaming skyscrapers that symbolise India’s economic growth sit alongside makeshift hovels.
Like their counterparts around the world, India’s business elite likes to justify their position in society on the basis of their own personal initiative, acumen and drive. In reality, their wealth is the product of the exploitation of the country’s huge reserves of cheap labour and depends on the continued impoverishment of the rest of the population. This worsening social divide will inevitably produce a rebellion against the appalling conditions created by profit system and the ruling elites that defend and benefit from it.
http://www.daily.pk/half-of-india%E2%80%99s-population-lives-below-the-poverty-line-19568/

POVERTY: Poverty index: who is the poorest of them all?

In a working paper by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford, UK, this month, Sabine Akire and Maria Emma Santos present a new method for measuring and comparing poverty in 104 developing countries: the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). This index is a composite of three dimensions that are made up of ten indicators—health (child mortality, nutrition), education (years of school education, child enrolment), and living standards (electricity, drinking water, sanitation, flooring, cooking fuel, assets).
The base population for the MPI is the household, and the emphasis is on the individual rather than on the country. For example, there are 3000 times more people living in India than in the Maldives, but according to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) India and the Maldives each contribute equally as a south Asian country. According to the MPI, 1659 million (31·7%) of 5230 million people (78·5% of world's population) in developing countries live in acute poverty (on US$1·25—2 per day). 29·5% of people in developing countries live in south Asia; this region contributes 51% of individuals living in developing countries who are poor—1·8 times the total poor population in sub-Saharan Africa. Bihar, the poorest state in India, has more poor people (95 million) living there than do nine of ten poorest countries in Africa.
The MPI enables the identification of concomitant deprivations within households, and the clustering of deprivations in different countries. Therefore, its use will assist governments and policy makers to implement relevant interventions to remove these deprivations, address any urban—rural differences, and ensure that countries make progress towards the achievement of the MDGs (because eight MPI indicators are directly linked to the MDGs). Even in regions that are not as poor as south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, millions of people live in acute poverty. Governments and policy makers need to focus on all individuals living in poverty, and not only those living in a region defined as poor, or on meeting set targets; all people should be helped out of the poverty trap.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673610611257/fulltext?rss=yes

POVERTY: Remeasuring Poverty

July 26th, 2010
Talking about the number of people living on or below a “dollar a day” is a simple, effective way of telling the story of progress (or the lack of it) in reducing global poverty. But focusing on income alone has obvious limitations as a measure of extreme poverty. These have been highlighted by the launch this month of a new index of “multidimensional poverty”, which takes into account specific deprivations such as inadequate education, sanitation and electricity as well as low income. There are ten different measures in all, and someone deficient in 70% of these is clearly worse off than someone lacking in 40%.
As well as providing greater detail about the different forms of extreme poverty in different parts of the world, the new measure, devised by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme, shows that there are many more people living in extreme poverty than is suggested by the dollar a day measure (or, strictly speaking, $1.25 a day): 1.7 billion, rather than 1.3 billion.
The index will be incorporated into the UNDP’s annual Human Development Report, the 20th edition of which will be published in October, and should improve its already invaluable Human Development Index.
To see the difference the new measure makes, consider two African countries, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Using the income measure of poverty alone, Ethiopia looks much the less impoverished of the two – 39% of its population living in extreme poverty compared to 89% of Tanzanians. Use the multidimensional poverty measure, however, and the picture is reversed: around 65% of Tanzanians are in extreme poverty, compared with 90% of Ethiopians. Niger has the highest percentage of people in extreme multidimensional poverty, at 93%.
Despite these examples, and Africa’s generally impoverished image in the media, it accounts for ‘only’ 28% of the people in the world living in extreme multidimensional poverty. Over 51% live in South Asia. Despite India’s consistently strong economic growth, the 421m people living in extreme multidimensional poverty in eight of its states exceed the total number living similarly impoverished lives in the 26 poorest African countries combined.
These new numbers should add to the sense of urgency not only among India’s growing army of billionaires, at least some of whom are exploring how to be effective philanthrocapitalists, but also at the various international meetings scheduled for September to consider how to make greater progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The more subtle measurement of the details of poverty in different places should be of great help to philanthrocapitalists and others as they try better to target their efforts on the areas of greatest need.
http://www.philanthrocapitalism.net/2010/07/remeasuring-poverty/

POVERTY: Understanding the multidimensionality of poverty

July 21, 2010,
With much of the world’s attention focused on reducing the incidence of poverty, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in collaboration with academics of Oxford University, recently launched a new index to measure poverty levels that will show a multidimensional picture of people living in hardship, and could help target development resources more effectively.
The new measure, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI, was developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) with UNDP support. To be featured in the forthcoming 20th Anniversary edition of the UNDP Human Development Report, the MPI will replace the Human Poverty Index, which had been included in these reports since 1997.
This year’s Human Development Report will employ the MPI that assesses a range of critical factors or “deprivations” on the household level, from education to health outcomes to assets and services. Taken together, these factors provide a fuller portrait of acute poverty than simple income measures.
In explaining the MPI, the new measure is likened to a high-resolution lens which reveals a vivid spectrum of challenges facing the poorest households. The MPI provides a fuller measure of poverty than the traditional dollar-a-day formulas. It is expected to be a valuable addition to the family of instruments that are used to examine broader aspects of well-being.
The UNDP and OPHI researchers analyzed data from 104 countries with a combined population of 5.2 billion or 78 percent of the world’s total. About 1.7 billion people in the countries covered – a third of their entire population – live in multidimensional poverty, according to the MPI. This exceeds the 1.3 billion people, in those same countries, estimated to live on $1.25 a day or less, the more commonly accepted measure of “extreme poverty.” Half of the world’s poor as measured by the MPI live in South Asia (51 percent or 844 million people) and one quarter in Africa (28 percent or 458 million). Even in countries with strong economic growth in recent years, the MPI analysis reveals the persistence of acute poverty.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index definitely provides a fuller account of a prolonged global problem, allowing global and national leaders a better handle of the woe that needs to be attended to.
http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/268117/understanding-multidimensionality-poverty

POVERTY: Poverty levels in South Asia

(July 15 2010): The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative in conjunction with the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme have developed a new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) that disturbingly found that half of the world's poorest live in South Asia and, and contrary to popular belief, only a quarter live in Africa.The index notes that 421 million MPI poor reside in six Indian states namely Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and West Bengal - this number vying with 26 of the poorest African countries. The responsible factor is evidently unchecked population growth rates in these six states, with a growth rate higher than the Indian national average, and poor literacy rates as a consequence of small outlay by these six states on education.Statistics on poverty are critical in determining a government's expenditure priorities by focusing public attention on those areas that are sadly deficient. In Pakistan under the Benazir Income Support Programme, designed to provide Rs 1000 per month to 2.7 million poorest households, the government was compelled to abandon its earlier methodology of inviting parliamentarians across the political divide to identify a limited number of poor in their constituencies and, at the World Bank's insistence, began to develop a poverty scorecard.This scorecard is essentially a 13 indicator instrument which identifies the poor and requires information that includes household size, composition, education, employment, and certain household assets. Ignored by this scorecard are other critical information that are used by the MPI to determine poverty namely health, environment and gender dimensions.The scorecard, analysts argue, has other limitations also that include an overwhelming focus on assets, consumption considered a dependent variable and assuming a cardinality of ordinal data and perfect substitutability across dimensions. A paper published in January 2009 titled "Estimation of Multidimensional Poverty in Pakistan" notes that indicators of financial poverty, human poverty, poor housing and lack of physical assets were combined to get a composite index of poverty across multiple deprivations. These income and non-income indicators were developed using Household Income and Expenditure Surveys for the years 2004-05 and 2000-01.The empirical findings "reveal that about 54 percent of the people of Pakistan were in the state of multiple deprivations in the year 2004-05. Rural incidence was about 69 percent, while 21 percent of urban population faced extreme poverty in terms of indicators used in the construction of multidimensional poverty. An important finding of this study is that the magnitudes of equity-sensitive multidimensional poverty aggregates (poverty gap and poverty severity) are quite high as compared with income poverty.This situation indicates high inequality among the poor in terms of non-income poverty dimensions. Inter-temporal consistency of methodology facilitates future monitoring of multidimensional phenomenon of poverty." Many argue that BISP is a start and would eventually include health insurance as well. And given the severe resource constraints the government is unable to invest more in providing social safety nets that are required given our rising poverty levels.That argument is consistent with the state of the economy however where our government continues to show poor performance is in allocating expenditure priorities, a reflection of poor governance, where current expenditure continues to reflect profligacy and development expenditure continues to be slashed to accommodate the rise in current expenditure. That must change.
http://www.pakistantalk.com/forums/social-affairs/7480-poverty-levels-south-asia.html

POVERTY: Revisiting Indian Poverty

Even as India once more self-declares its “arrival on the world stage” with a symbol for the Indian rupee, a global assessment presents a depressing picture of India’s actual economic performance. In a study whose conclusions were to be expected, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI) has revealed that an appropriate index of poverty (and deprivation) finds its incidence in India and elsewhere to be much greater than estimated by the controversy-dogged measures of “income poverty” that abound.
Commissioned by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme to evolve a multi-dimensional approach to and define a more appropriate index of poverty for inclusion in the 20th anniversary edition of its flagship Human Development Report, the OPHDI has recently completed its study that provides a new assessment of the level and distribution of global poverty.
Authored by Sabina Alkire and James Foster, the new measures of poverty go beyond the income measures to capture the range of deprivations individuals suffer because of factors varying from inadequate education to ill health and poor standards of living. Thus, besides the conventional head-count of those below a certain income or calorie-consumption level the Alkire-Foster index attempts (as the Human Development Index had done) to aggregate measures of a range of deprivations. It also attempts to measure the intensity of poverty in terms of the average number of deprivations individuals in households suffer.
It is to be expected that as we move from purely income measures to more multi-dimensional indices the incidence and intensity of poverty would increase. But what is noteworthy in the evidence on the Indian case is not just the gap between measures of income poverty and societal deprivation, but the story it tells about the incidence of poverty in certain Indian regions when compared with other poor countries of the world and about the poor progress made over time in addressing certain kinds of deprivation. Thus, OPHI research suggests that as compared with 410 million multi-dimensionally poor people resident in 26 of the poorest African countries there are as many as 421 million in just eight of the poorer Indian states (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal). Further, if we take an indicator such as the proportion of malnourished children, progress with dealing with acute malnourishment seems non-existent: the figure across India stood at 46 per cent in 2005-06 as compared with 47 per cent in 1998-99.
These and other similar pieces of evidence indicate that the policy establishment must exercise more than modicum of caution when advertising India’s economic success and announcing its arrival as a second-tier global power. Moreover, since these developments occur in the midst of India’s much-vaunted departure from the “Hindu rate of growth” and its climb to a 9 per cent rate, they raise two questions. First, does GDP growth tell us anything about economic performance defined to include some measure of economic well-being? Second, have we been experiencing in this country a process of growth which is hugely inaequalising, with attendant implications for social order?
India’s elite did not require the OPHI to alert it on the need to pose these questions. It has for long been known that the official estimates of even income poverty had cynically misused numbers that were inter-temporally incomparable because of changes in the questionnaire used by the National Sample Survey Organisation in its quinquennial consumer expenditure surveys. This helped present a picture of substantial decline in the incidence of poverty over time, and especially during the years of liberalisation. Moreover, even measures of poverty that adjusted for the problem of incomparability were based on a poverty line so low that if we took an expenditure level of, say, Rs. 20 a day, the incidence of poverty more than doubled. As a result we now have a multiplicity of estimates of the number and proportion of the income poor in India.
But this too has not helped settle the controversy, because the evidence pointed to very different estimates. While the “poverty lines” for rural and urban areas are supposed to be (price-adjusted) representations of the income required to deliver defined individual calorific intakes, direct figures on actual calorific intake point to much larger populations being deprived of a minimum of nutrition than the income poverty measures do.
Finally, it has been known that once we went beyond pure income measures of poverty and looked at other indicators of deprivation, not only was the incidence of deprivation substantial in terms of indicators varying from literacy to child malnutrition, but the progress in alleviating certain forms of deprivation had slowed during the high growth years. The problem is not just that India has significantly underperformed when addressing poverty and deprivation over 60-plus years of post-Independence development, but that progress has slowed in precisely those years when the surpluses available to tackle this problem has increased substantially. The problem is not inadequate growth, but one of institutional inadequacy. It is also one of an increasing reluctance of the elite to address those inadequacies and, therefore, of the failure of what is undisputedly one of the most remarkable experiments with parliamentary democracy.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Chandrasekhar/article520543.ece

POVERTY: Poverty haunts India's economic miracle

Jul 17, 2010
ZARUA, India — When flames from an open cooking fire raced through Fida Hussein's shack in northern India, it was a disaster for him and his poverty-stricken family.
"We have nothing," said Hussein as he stood in the ruins of his hut through which the sky could be seen between the burnt roof timbers in a remote corner of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state.
India's number of millionaires grew by 51 percent to 126,700 in 2009, according to US investment bank Merrill Lynch and consultants Capgemini, boosted by a buoyant economy which grew 8.6 percent in the last fiscal quarter.
But increasing wealth has not trickled down to the likes of 40-year-old Hussein, a landless labourer whose seamed face is prematurely aged, and his family of six children who have no toys, books or other possessions.
"We have no clothes, no furniture," he said, gesturing to what remained of his burned out shack which he had roughly patched up with plastic bags.
"We have only one quilt -- eight of us sleep under it in winter," he said, as his children played in the dirt yard outside the hut. "But there's no use in crying -- no one hears us," he added.
Like the more than 400 million Indians who have no electricity, Hussein's home has has no lighting and there is no running water in the huts in his village, which lies 60 kilometres (40 miles) from the state capital Lucknow.
In 1947, in his midnight independence address, India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called for "the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity."
It's an end that still seems a long way off.
In April, the Planning Commission, India's premier economic policymaking body, raised its estimate of the number of Indians living in poverty -- unable to meet their nutritional needs -- from 28 percent to 37 percent, which is roughly 440 million of the 1.2 billion population.
A new international Mulitple Poverty Index, developed at Oxford University and measuring a wide range of household-level deprivation, suggests that more people are mired in poverty in just eight Indian states than in the 26 poorest African countries.
"There are two categories growing in the 'Rising India'... the super rich, and the abysmally poor," noted newspaper editor M.J. Akbar in a recent column.
The left-of-centre Congress government was re-elected on a pro-poor platform that promised to do something for its main support base in India's rural hinterlands.
During its first term, it increased social spending, raising health and education budgets and launched a huge public works program -- the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act -- and a big loan repayment waiver for farmers.
But Hussein, who does work for local farmers, says he has not managed to obtain a card needed to work in the jobs scheme. Others in the area complain that they only get a few days work with the programme.
Former premier Rajiv Gandhi once said only 15 percent of development money gets to its intended targets. While things have improved, there is still a lot of "leakage" from poverty programmes.
The government will spend at least 250 billion dollars on services for the poor in the next five years but a recent report by investment house CLSA Asia Pacific Markets estimated more than 100 billion dollars would be skimmed off.
"There's personal gain going on at public cost where people who are supposed to look after the interests of the people accumulate large sums," Anupama Jha, executive director of Transparency International India, said.
Corruption, she said, is rife -- percolating through government, the private sector, the police and the judiciary.
"There are signs of deterioration in behaviour where people who have access to money do not feel accountable to the people they represent," Jha said.
"The poor are not spared even in the case of targeted programmes" and are often obliged to pay bribes to take advantage of public services, according to a recent study by the group.
Hardwari Lal, a labourer who has three children and whose wife is expecting a fourth, says he also has not received the card needed to get work.
Lal, 32, owes a moneylender who is charging five percent interest a month on a 7,000 rupee (150-dollar) loan he took out for his son's hospital bill.
"There is only so much I can do," he said, adding he has no way of feeding his family properly as he can barely keep up with the interest payments let alone make a dent in the principal.
"So many poor villagers are caught up in this cycle of poverty where they get into difficulty and go to a moneylender," said local development worker Vikrant Kumar.
As part of its anti-poverty drive, the government is drafting a Right to Food Act which calls for a government-subsidized minimum of 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of wheat and rice a month for households below the poverty line.
Hussain feeds his six children two meals a day -- potatoes and wheat chapatis or flat bread -- and eats one meal a day himself. Dal, the mainstay of Indian diets because of its high protein, is too expensive, he says.
Malnutrition among under-fives in India stands at 43.5 percent -- worse than sub-Saharan Africa -- and only nine percentage points less than when India's "economic miracle" began in 1991.
During the same period, India's gross domestic product per capita has jumped 50-fold.
"We have gone from being a food deficit country to a food surplus country, which is a big achievement, but there's a lot to be done in terms of getting the food to people who need it," said Indian political author Ajoy Bose.
"You look slightly stupid in claiming to be a major power or even a modern progressive state if you haven't done the very elementary basics for your marginalised population," Bose said.
Mountains of grain and vegetables still rot each year due to poor storage and distribution.
The immense gap between poor and rich has been pointed to by numerous commentators as a factor fuelling a growing Maoist insurgency that has spread across a large swathe of the country and is at its strongest in remote, impoverished regions.
"It is not just poverty that is increasing, it also the inequality," said senior Indian communist leader Brinda Karat.
The government insists it needs double-digit growth to eradicate poverty, but New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst Devinder Sharma argues that effective distribution of wealth is the real key.
"We are already on a growth trajectory, but people are getting poorer. Eradicating poverty is not woven into growth," he said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iobZ4vyzpNpFupFdweIojf1VzmRQ

POVERTY: India: even worse than Africa

Eight Indian states account for more poor people than in the 26 poorest African countries combined, a new measure of global poverty has found.
The Indian states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, have 421 million "poor" people, the study found.
This is more than the 410 million poor in the poorest African countries, it said.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures a range of "deprivations" at household levels.
Developed by Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) with UN support, it will feature in the upcoming UNDP Human Development Report.
The measure assess a number of "deprivations" in households - from education to health to assets and services.
"The MPI is like a high resolution lens which reveals a vivid spectrum of challenges facing the poorest households," said OPHI director Dr Sabina Alkire.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10609407